¶ … Treatments An Analysis of the Effectiveness of Psychological and Critical Incident Stress Debriefings

The world in which we live today is an ever-changing, precarious environment. Many individuals, for these very reasons, experience stressful, life-altering incidents much more often than in the past. These experiences, transmitted more rapidly than ever thanks to newly discovered technologies, can harm an individual greatly, especially if hidden from expert analysis, and can provoke long-lasting psychological, emotional and even physical damage to an individual. Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), for instance, is an umbrella term given to those individuals who have experienced traumatic or stress-inducing incidents, be they from military experiences or simply from a death in the family through some traumatic means. PTSD has been diagnosed as a disorder only recently, however, and many of the treatments that have been suggested as a means through which to deal with PTSD are still being tested. The two articles below examine whether, in fact, the treatments proposed by various studies have been effective in their scopes, and aim to answer how to better the means through which psychological and critical stress incident debriefings can be truly effective.

Summary

The first article is, in fact, a book review provided by the Guilford Press. The authors of this book aim to address, according...

These authors, in an updated edition of a previous version of the same book, thus analyze the challenges, interventions, and advances made in treating stress disorders with a specific focus on PTSD. The review claims that some of the interventions analyzed have been effective, and the book is well aimed in its revisions (Foa et. al., p.1). The strengths of the book are, for example, the fact that it focuses in depth on many of the studies that have been conducted concerning PTSD, and, furthermore, it examines the effect of traumatic stress on children and adolescents. The book also provides, as one of its strengths, a coding system, as follows:
"This system includes six classification levels, A through F, indicating the degree of empirical support for a particular treatment. Treatments with a classification of Level A have the highest rating (indicating that the evidence is based on well-controlled, randomized controlled trials for people with PTSD) and treatments with a classification of Level F have the lowest rating (indicating a newly developed treatment that has not been empirically or clinically studied in PTSD)" (Foa et. al., p.2).

In the second article, the reader is presented with a clear-cut study. This study, according to the very first mentions of aims of the research, claims to review…